Target Australia has decided to pull video game Grand Theft Auto V from its shelves due to its depiction of gratuitous violence against women.
The game allows players to use a first-person screen view to pay for prostitutes and then kill them afterwards – with guns, machetes, and even by running them down with their cars.
Grand Theft Auto, now in its fifth iteration, has regularly attracted criticism throughout its seventeen-year history for encouraging violence against women, but this time, the campaign against it was successful and Target is refusing to sell the game altogether. Is something finally changing when it comes to our society’s attitudes towards violence against women?
Target’s decision to remove the game from its shelves was announced following the launch of a petition to stop the sale of the game, which received over 42,000 signatures in one day.
“It’s a game that encourages players to murder women for entertainment. The incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get ‘health’ points – and now Target are stocking it and promoting it for your Xmas stocking,” the petitions authors, Nicole, Kat and Claire, said.
“This misogynistic GTA 5 literally makes a game of bashing, killing and horrific violence against women.”
The petition’s authors also posted a video of a player in a first-person screen view killing a woman by hitting her with his car and then shooting her repeatedly.
Nicole, along with co-authors Kat and Claire, are survivors of violence themselves.
“Just knowing that women are being portrayed as deserving to be sexually used by men and potentially murdered for sport and pleasure – to see this violence that we lived through turned into a form of entertainments is sickening and causes us great pain and harm.”
Target’s Manager of Corporate Affairs Jim Hooper pulled the game from shelves yesterday, saying, “there is a significant level of concern about the game’s content”. Hooper made clear in his statement that it was specifically GTA V’s depiction of violence against women that led him to remove this game, and not other R-rated games, from Target’s shelves. And that, in itself, is heartening.
After seventeen years of violent, misogynistic content in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it, one petition has managed to bring the game off shelves in a matter of days. Both the enormous number of people who signed the petition and the fact that Target were so quick to respond means that something is different now than it has been for those last seventeen years when it comes to how we treat violence against women.
Better still, taking action to remove a video game that encourages violence against women from shelves means we are now more committed to making sure the next generation of boys will grow up thinking and acting differently when it comes to gendered violence.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, family or domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000